Keeper of Her Memories: Friendship in the Shadow of Dementia

There are friendships that teach you things when you’re young — how to share crayons, how to keep secrets, how to be loyal even when you’re mad. And then there are friendships that teach you things decades later, lessons you never expected to need. Jean’s best friend since kindergarten is teaching her the limits of her patience now. Yesterday she called Jean fifteen time, and had she answered each call, they would have been as fresh to Nancy as the first. Dementia has taken her memory, but not her need for connection. Jean got a little short with her on one of those calls — but Nancy didn’t remember it. Maybe that’s the grace and mercy in all of this...AI

I call Nancy my best friend since kindergarten, where we bonded over the sandbox. It was a large wooden box up on legs, filled with beach sand and assorted toys for the boys to build roads and moats for the sandcastles we girls made. Water was involved, and so were boxes and tin cans—our architectural building tools—and we had a cardboard drawbridge. Kindergarten in the ‘40s was nothing like it is today. It was more like daycare: story time, play time, and learning how to get along. If we learned anything academic, it didn’t register in my memory bank.

Nancy lived around the corner, and we walked to and from school every day from kindergarten through high school graduation — except for a two‑week period when we weren’t speaking. Try as I might, I can’t remember what we were fighting about. If I hadn’t destroyed most of my diaries when I moved into my continuum care community, I could have looked it up. I was a regular Laura Ingalls back in my teens, only instead of writing about frontier life I chronicled the movies we saw, the records we bought, the boys who looked our way, and other silly fluff no one would care about even if those diaries had survived two hundred years.

Nancy doesn’t remember that fight, let alone what caused it. She has dementia now, and if she calls her sons and nieces as often as she calls me, I feel sorry for them. Yesterday she called me fifteen times — not her record. I usually answer once a day and we talk for 12 to 17 minutes. But yesterday I broke my own rule and answered a second time. I wish I hadn’t.

We had just hung up from a half‑hour conversation where I told her about a Mahjong class I was teaching that afternoon. I thought the extra‑long chat might keep her from repeat dialing while I was teaching. It didn’t. When I answered the second time, I let my annoyance show as I told her my class was starting in a few minutes. “Oh, what class is that?” she asked. "We’ll talk tomorrow," I replied then hung up without saying goodbye. 

The next day she was her normal cheerful self, asking how my day was going. I didn’t bother apologizing — she wouldn’t have remembered me hanging up on her any more than she remembers our teenage fight. It’s funny how memory works as people settle deeper into Dementia Village. Nancy can still talk recipes and cooking, one of my least favorite topics. But she was always my go‑to person for anything resembling entertaining. She spent most of her adult life creating fabulous menus and dinner parties in Washington, D.C. Her husband was an economics adviser who worked in the White House when the Democrats were in office and at the Brookings Institution when they weren’t. She loved china and linens and had seven or eight complete sets of dishes to prove it. I, on the other hand, fell apart at the thought of planning a party. And I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I planned a party — assuming I had lost two of my digits chopping cucumbers.

Now that she’s been moved to an Assisted Living facility, she often tells me she feels better after she talks to me. I don’t tell her she leaves me exhausted. We’ve been friends too long for that kind of honesty. Even my brother, when I saw him a couple of times a week down in our Memory Care building, didn’t wear me out like Nancy’s calls do. And they both sang the same songs: the Oh, How I Want to go Home blues and the I don’t Belong Here! protest march.

I also never told her about the time she flew from D.C. to Michigan after Don died and I had to run out and buy a stack of linen napkins to match my collection of antique diner dishes because I knew she thought paper napkins were beyond tacky. She would have died of cardiac arrest if she knew — gasp! — that sometimes I even used paper towels. She wanted to see me with her own eyes to know I was okay. That’s the kind of friend she was.

We were opposites in many ways. Don and I were blue‑collar; Nancy and her husband were white‑collar. They had children; we didn’t. She ignored politics completely; I loved talking about them. She loved to shop; I was allergic to the the upscale stores we'd go when she was in town. But our roots bound us together. And despite the miles between us, we could always sense when the other was stressed and needed a phone call.

I’ve been lucky to have two best friends in my life. One I met in kindergarten, and we were two peas in a pod until she married and moved out of state. For a couple of years, I resented her husband for taking her away. I missed having a best friend until Don came along and took on that role. Now, looking back, I wonder if Nancy and I had lived in the same city all these years, how that might have affected our marriages or friendship. We taught each other how to be loyal best friends, and we transferred that skill to our spouses. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think it’s possible to have two best friends at the same time. And a spouse will usually — rightly so — come first because you’re building a life together.

On the other hand, none of us can be everything to everyone. And as we age, our roles change. A spouse becomes a caregiver. A child or niece becomes our decision‑maker. A friend, like me, becomes a shoulder to cry on when the “mean children” won’t let you go back home. I’m also the only person still alive who knew Nancy during her first twenty‑five years on earth. By default, I’m the only one left who can help her reach back into those years. Searching for those memories in the dark corners of my mind so I can ask, “Do you remember the time…” might exhaust me, but it also makes me feel useful. I accept that new role with both sadness and pride that I still know where the drawbridge went in that old kindergarten sandbox. ©

Photo: The two of us, circa late 1950s.